GNU Accessibility Statement

Project GNU urges people working on free
software to follow standards and guidelines for universal
accessibility on GNU/Linux and other free operating systems.
Multi-platform projects should use the cross platform accessibility
interfaces available that include GNU/Linux distributions and the
GNOME desktop. Project GNU also advises developers of web sites to
follow the guidelines set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium's Web
Accessibility Initiative.

According to the United Nations in 2005, there were 600 million
people with disabilities in the world. To use computers, many of them
need special software known as “access technology”. Like
other programs, these can be free software or proprietary. Those
which are free software respect
the freedom of their users; the rest, proprietary programs,
subject those users to the power of the program's owner. Programs for
accessibility ethically must be free software, like other
programs.

In order for access technology to work, the other software in use
must interoperate with it. The majority of computer programs and web
sites (85% in one estimate) do not comply with accessibility standards
and guidelines, so they do not work with access technology. They
provide a frustrating experience, and can bar users from job or school
activities.

Proprietary file formats that require proprietary reading programs
are poison to both accessibility and to the freedoms that we as free
software activists hope to establish. The biggest offender is Flash
format; it usually requires proprietary software that doesn't
cooperate with accessibility. Microsoft Silverlight is similar.
PDF is also
difficult; though there is free software to view it, it does not
support free access technology software. Improving this is an
important project.

People with disabilities deserve to have control of their own
technological destinies. When they use proprietary access technology,
they have little or no way to correct whatever is wrong with it.
Virtually all major decisions of the proprietary developers are made
by people who do not have the disability; 20 years' experience shows
that people with unusual combinations of disabilities, who require
relatively unusual software, or who encounter a bug that keeps them
from doing their job have no way to obtain the changes they need.
These products are only changed or improved when the vendors see a
business reason for doing the work; this leaves many users behind. As
a secondary problem, proprietary access software is far more expensive
than a PC. Many users cannot afford to give up their freedom in this
way.

Nations with large populations also have large numbers of people
with disabilities. Countries including Brazil and Russia are
discussing whether to standardize government purchases on GNU/Linux
platforms. These nations are all signatories to the UN Convention on
the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and include technology in
their agenda for providing such rights. This will require them to
hire programmers to work on accessibility software for their
populations. If it is free software, the rest of the world will be
able to use it too. The hackers who work on free access technology
will provide tools that people with disabilities can use to expand
their horizons enormously.

Making a program accessible is no substitute for making it respect
users' freedom—these are separate issues—but the two
fit naturally together.

Recommendations

Application software developers should learn how to use the
accessibility features of the IDE or toolkit they employ to build their user
interface.

Programmers who need to implement access technology, or
work on a desktop or OS-level accessibility problem, will need to
understand the appropriate accessibility API, and should choose the one that is
compatible with free OS/desktops. These include the GNOME
accessibility API (GNU/Linux platforms only), the Java
accessibility API (GNU/Linux and Windows) and iAccessible2
(GNU/Linux and Windows).